Stud Muffin Baldrick sat in his bright red crumpet cruiser in the car park idly chatting up Chopstix, who was sitting in Foghorn’s knackered old Ford Oorsanawonkywheel. Ms. Whiplash swept into the car park with Eth, arching a disapproving eyebrow at the upstart stealing her thunder. Here we were in horsey Lambourn, looking forward to a few-furlong trot among the lovely countryside little knowing that a lengthy point-to-point awaited us. At the Gather Round we welcomed quite a few new faces, then our race starter Incider informed us of the delights to come, including a selection of topiary performed by herself in an attempt to tame an overgrown part of the course. The crowd of magnificent beasts milled and stamped, eager for the start. Incider flung out a pointing finger…and we were off. Well, some of us. The vast majority of the herd settled for a bit more milling and stamping while Foghorn, Lemming and I hurtled off on the track across the field. The starter screamed frenziedly "On Back!" as she realised we were galloping towards the On Inn. We reined back and followed on after Zebedee, Dave and Erik the Viking, who had taken up the running. Soon we hit a check and yours truly, ever a sucker for a big hill, ran up the nearest one. Even as I gasped my way up it I couldn’t help noticing the almost perfectly conical flour blobs placed neatly at the side of the road. Beautifully done Hares. The good news was that this was On. The bad was that I was at the bottom of another hill with no-one else in sight. The news got worse as I reached the bar check almost at the top and had to return to the last blob. A point of interest here; the Hares used a line of flour to indicate not only bar checks but falses too, which was a tad confusing but added to the fun. Wally and the rest followed me into the forest and we motored along the path, thoroughly enjoying the trees, the breeze and the scenery. Only problem was, we lost everybody else apart from Ladybird and so stopped at the hill bottom (this was Wally’s surprisingly good idea) to let everyone catch up. At this point a horsey lady who was obviously eating a plum turned up in a Land Rover and gave us an excellent view of her teeth and nostrils while firmly telling us not to spook her valued racehorses. Lemming arrived and gave her the old glad-eye, which rather spooked her so she jumped in the old ‘Rover and naffed off.

So did we. This was the start of an up hill, down dale, along the road, over the field etc. etc. It was rather like the Fun Run, especially when we croaked up a hill to meet the walkers who kindly waved us on our way with one and two-fingered salutes. Now a short while afterwards who should we meet but Dumper and Septic, trolling about near a check in a vacant manner. They seemed to have no idea how they had got there or indeed where they were going. But then nor had our small band of runners (we’d given up Hashing by now) so we let Erik the Viking find the false trail and we buggered off down the other – to yet another huge hill. Not far from here was where I accidentally staggered over a false only to be ratted on to the RA by C5 and Uptake – the sods. A long, long run lay ahead until we spotted Incider’s immaculately laid out back garden, complete with beer and sarnies (excellently prepared by our chef of the day, Brian, sporting his ‘Non Hash Brigade Catering Corps’ badge of office). It was noticeable that Ms. Whiplash and Eth had cornered all the seating despite having sauntered casually along the short trail. It was a great impromptu party with dogs Jake, Kundun and Megan all begging for (and occasionally stealing) sandwiches, drinking from the bird bath and bumping against everybody’s legs. Baby Ryan stared at us all in one-eyed amazement (his hood had slipped round). Handful slowly turned into Miss Goosepimples 2001. Septic regaled Motox, Foghorn, myself and others about some chap who had been wearing a tweed-ish suit at the pub. She’s obviously drinking far too much Wincarnis these days. Scrumper and Lorraine finally turned up.

And then we were off again, out through the front of the house, desperately getting cold muscles to run and ignoring the sandwwiches and beer churning about in the belly. Fortunately, this part was nowhere near as long as the first part, and it did have a super stream to run through. It wasn’t long before we hit the On Inn where we bumped into Flash! Where the hell had he been?

Motox officiated in his new, democratically elected RA role :-